CORBA launches into new ORBit

As evidenced by exhibits at the TeleManagement World show this month in Las Vegas, CORBA is heating up. Much current operations support system development uses CORBA to address a major challenge: interconnection between disparate network elements. Several key OSS players demonstrated solutions that included the CORBA interface for provisioning, network management and performance management. Although no standard interconnection interface exists, the TeleManagement Forum supports CORBA as a potential standard interface. However, some developers consider CORBA cumbersome, a memory hog and somewhat inflexible.

One developer decided to alleviate those concerns. Software solutions provider Vertel launched e*orb, an embedded object request broker (ORB) optimized specifically for the telecommunications industry. An ORB is a middleware product that establishes the client/server relationship between objects in a network to facilitate interoperability.

CORBA is an object message-based architecture that enables multiplatform integration, and e*orb is the realization of a carrier-grade CORBA.

"e*orb is based on the Object Management Group's minimum CORBA specification," said Ann Marie O'Connor, product manager for Vertel. "It's a subset of CORBA 2.2 that focuses on having CORBA run in a resource-constrained environment where performance is a key issue and memory is at a premium."

Vertel's new broker originally was developed for Sprint's Integrated On-Demand Network. Sprint already has deployed an older CORBA version from Vertel and has committed to use e*orb in the next implementation of its application services framework. "e*orb is a fundamental component of that application services framework. It will underlie all [of Sprint's] OSSs and be the primary interoperability infrastructure for all OSS applications they deploy," said Ruth Cox, vice president of marketing for Vertel.

When e*orb was released, Vertel also announced Tellium's adoption of the technology as an imbedded solution in its Aurora optical switching platform.

"[Having] e*orb inside the system is really going to improve the communication speed within the network elements," said Nick DeVito, director of marketing and product management for Tellium.

e*orb allows Tellium to deploy its optical switches in a mesh network while providing the reliability and restoration ability commonly associated with a ring-based architecture. "The Holy Grail of mesh networking is getting the same performance and restoration ability of a ring network at half the cost," DeVito said. "That's what we're delivering."

Though Tellium has imbedded e*orb into its LynxOS operating system, one of the product's key features is its portability; it was released on seven different platforms, including Solaris, Windows NT and devices based on Palm OS and Windows CE.

"We feel CORBA is absolutely the direction everyone is headed. We saw it as the future of OSS," DeVito said.

>From Tellium's large-scale implementation to a wireless provisioning application, Vertel has demonstrated the scalability of e*orb. "We've seen enterprise ORB vendors try to run their own ORBs in an imbedded environment, and it's like forcing a huge monolithic infrastructure down into an imbedded environment, which hasn't worked, so we started small and scaled from there," O'Connor said.